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Feature: Twin Turbos Motivate This Monte SS – About the Ride

This exclusive feature takes a look at how a two turbo Chevy blew in the heat from Alabama! The second part of this feature takes a closer look at Shane Stack’s ride. If you missed Part 1, be sure to check it out first!

If not for the decals and exhaust, Stack’s Monte could easily be mistaken for an ultra-clean Pro Street ride.

Typically running in the 160- to 165-mph range on a good track, Stack turned in his best elapsed time so far in February 2010 at South Georgia Motorsports Park, going 4.65 seconds at 169.70 mph, but the good times didn’t last long. A month later at Steele, Alabama, Stack stuffed the car hard into the guardwall and put himself on the sidelines until September when repairs were completed. “It pretty much tore the whole front end off. I had to put a new frame rail out front and we had to rebuild pretty much everything from the firewall forward,” Stack says. “That was the most work we ever had to do for an accident, but we totally rebuilt the car at Lemmond’s place back in ’08 when we got the chassis and cage recertified to SFI 25.2. We tore it down to nothing and completely redid everything, took the original cage out and put in all new tubing, just rebuilt everything.”

The bright, red Monte Carlo body has been treated to a makeover, too, with a new fiberglass front end, doors and deck lid complemented by carbon-fiber T-tops fabricated by Stack. “The roof, rear fenders and floor pan are all original to the car.”

The cleanly fabricated interior features the turbos’ intercooler occupying the passenger seat.

Stack continues to race the car in Limited Street, but also competes regularly in the increasingly popular Outlaw Drag Radial class. In addition to Terry, longtime friends Joe Courtney and Jake Thrower help out as trackside crew members.

“I run whatever I think is going to be better that day; I’m not biased,” he says of his tire choice. “The radial tire is faster, there’s no doubt about that; if the track is there and you can get down on it, the radial is faster, but if not I’ll just put the slicks on instead. The track definitely has to be better for the radial to work.”

The trunk has room for an intercooler reservoir, fuel cell, battery and little else.

Though preferring to run the drag radial tires whenever possible, Stack typically rides on 29 x true-10.5-inch slicks. With the absence of ORSCA and its highly manicured tracks, he’s been forced lately to accept less-than-stellar track prep at out-of-the-way venues.

“I’ve been doing a lot of that kind of racing lately, just running five-ohs and stuff like that. But that’s fast enough when you’re on a track like that. And I do strictly eighth-mile racing. I have run the quarter-mile before, years ago, but there is no love lost there; it’s not for me. It’s too fast, too hard on parts, too expensive, just too everything.”

The Lemmond’s Race Shop-fabricated rearend successfully transfers all of the horsepower into clean, strong launches.

For the future, Stack anticipates going a little quicker, though he doubts he’ll ever dominate his class again, given his car’s inherent aerodynamic limitations and weight. “We’ve done pretty good, but I can’t help but feel like we’ve really been chasing our tail at times,” he admits. “I feel in my heart it can go 4.50s; I haven’t done it yet, but everything I see says it should happen. Now, some of these guys are running .40s and that’s a serious number. I don’t know about that, but I can go .60s pretty easy when the conditions are there, so I really feel like .50s are within reach for us.

“There have been times when we were a dominant force. But we’re a lot faster now than we were back then, but everybody else is a lot faster, too. I don’t know if people were just slow learners back then, but they’ve sure caught up now.”

The front suspension was completely reconstructed in 2010 after an unfortunate on-track wall banger.

Regardless, don’t look for Stack to give up on his unique ride anytime soon: “I feel like this car is special because it’s not a Mustang,” he states. “There are only about four cars in this class that are not a Mustang, and there’s just this one that’s not a Mustang or a Camaro. I kind of like that.”